Managing bidders and buyers

As a seller, sometimes you might prefer to limit your sales to buyers you feel comfortable with, such as those who have positive Feedback scores. We offer several ways to help you define who can bid and buy your items.

Viewing bidder information

During an auction, sellers can see the usernames of all bidders.

Anonymous usernames are shown to all other members.

Blocking bidders and buyers

If you don't want to sell your items to certain members, you can add their usernames to a blocked list.

Members on your blocked list can't bid on or buy any of your items unless you remove them from the list.

You can block up to 5,000 usernames.

By default, blocked members are still able to contact you about your listings. You can change this setting in My eBay > Account > SitePreferences > BuyerRequirements. You can also get to Site Preferences from Seller Hub > Overview > Shortcuts.

Setting up buyer requirements

You can specify buyer requirements to manage the types of buyers who can bid on or buy your items. You set up buyer requirements for your listings, you reduce the number of buyers who might make sales a challenge, but you also reduce the number of potential bidders and buyers for your items.

You can specify buyer requirements for all your listings, or you can specify the requirements only for particular listings.

On the Buyer Requirements page, select your buyer requirements. For example, you might not want to do business with buyers who:

Don't have a PayPal account

Have unpaid items recorded on their account

Have a primary shipping address in countries you don't want to ship to

Have reportedly violated eBay policies

Have a negative Feedback score

Are currently winning or have bought a large number of your items in the last 10 days

If you want to apply these settings to all current and future listings, select the Apply above settings to current and future listings check box.

If you want to prevent blocked buyers from sending you questions about your listings, select the Do not allow blocked buyers to contact me check box. Remember, you also need to add the buyers to your blocked list.

Click Submit to save your requirements.

To add buyer requirements for a specific listing, specify your requirements in the listing form.

Canceling bids

You generally shouldn't cancel bids on your listings. However, there are a few reasons you may need to cancel a bid:

A bidder contacts you to back out of the bid.

You cannot verify the identity of the bidder after trying all reasonable means of contact.